And that’s when I clicked “close gesamtkunstwerk”

A sharp-eyed spy at tonight’s performance of Die Walküre at the Met notes that, while there were no malfunctions of the Machine per se, there was an unexpected moment of levity during the third act.

In the midst of the Wotan-Brünnhilde colloquy, “guess who made a guest appearance? The Microsoft logo… as a projection on The Machine during a technical glitch (about 1/2 a second) on the mountain.” The informant adds that this brief, almost subliminal moment “won the evening’s biggest laugh.”

So: the Machine runs on Windows. Suddenly everything makes sense. (Image based on a photo by Ken Howard.)

54 comments

this story reminds me of a boheme at washington opera several years ago (before it became the washington national opera) … domingo was conducting.

the laptop projecting the supertitles apparently ran critically low on power, and instead of projecting the next line offered up the customary warning … something along the lines of: your battery is critically low and you should switch to an alternate source of power — DURING MIMI’S DEATH SCENE!!!

the audience howled; domingo, who of course could not see the projections, was shocked and outraged — yet more proof that washingtonians were hopeless boors.